Woman of mixed racial heritage have historically been described as exotic, a term with simultaneously positive and negative connotations. Despite its various meanings, it always had a sexual connotation to it. On one hand it was a coded term for objectifying and fantasizing what such woman sexually offered that might be different from other women. On the other hand, it was term that suggested that such a woman was physically attractive in a way that set her apart from other women. This latter issue has made women, more than men of mixed race, the subject of suspicion and jealousy in heterosexually driven relationships in communities of color, because a woman's social worth has historically been attached to her physical appearance.

By applying fresh eyes to landmark historical cases and benchmark popular culture moments in the history of passing Dawkins also rethinks the representational character and civic purpose of multiracial identities. In the process she provides powerful insights called “passwords” that help readers tackle the tough questions of who we are and how we can relate to one another and the world.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

According to census reports, there were no Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina in the decades leading up to the Civil War. But as the war ended and Reconstruction began, a community, known today as the Lumbee Indians, moved from the category of mulatto into the category of Indian. My dissertation charts the emergence and evolution of Lumbee Indian identity. I argue that Lumbee identity was continually transformed in the midst of political struggles from the end of the Civil War through the post-World War II era. From the end of the Civil War to the 1930s, Lumbee identity was forged in the regional crucible of Reconstruction and Jim Crow politics and articulated through the local institutions of Indian-only churches and schools in Robeson County. Beginning in the 1930s and through the post-World War II era, national developments molded expressions of Lumbee Indian identity. The Great Depression, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, and the onset of World War II shifted the markers of Lumbee identity from churches, schools, and kinship networks to nationally recognized indices of Indianness such as measurements of Indian blood quantum, line of tribal descent, and recognizably Indian cultural traditions. By highlighting the change in Lumbee identity from a regional entity to a nationally inflected construct, this dissertation illuminates the interconnection between the contours of Lumbee identity and the shifting political landscape in Robeson County from the end of the Civil War through the World War II era.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Introduction

Chapter One: How an Outlaw became an Indian: Henry Berry Lowry and the Conservative Press, 1865-1872

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Cultural Reconstruction asks: How did the U.S. develop a national culture simultaneously unified and fractured by race? The little-examined history of American magazines offers a vital clue. The dissertation’s first part demonstrates how post-Jacksonian American culturists, deeply disturbed by the divisive partisanship of “male” politics, turned to the “female” culture of sentimentality with the hope of creating a coherent and inclusive nation. These culturists believed a nationally circulating magazine would be the medium of that culture. This belief derived from the wide success of the penny press revolution of the 1830s. Cutting against the traditional reading of the penny press, Cultural Reconstruction claims that newspapers were a major proponent of sentimentality but were barred from creating a national audience by their intense local appeal. Antebellum magazinists, from Edgar Allen Poe to James Russell Lowell, attempted to adapt the sentimental worldview of the penny press to a national audience, but were frustrated by a series of cultural rifts expressed chiefly in gendered terms. Part two of the dissertation examines how the post-Civil War magazine furthered the project of sentimentality and became the leading medium of national culture. Responding to the 1870s collapse of Political Reconstruction, editors such as Richard Watson Gilder at the Century employed a series of innovative aesthetic strategiesgreater realism, local color, and regional dialect believing they were creating a cultural panorama of American life. But this project of reconstruction was riven by two fundamentally conflicting visions of American identity: the regional versus the racial. The dissertation explores correspondence between Northern magazinists and white and black Southern authors (George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Thomas Nelson Page) to reveal how race won out: Northern editors helped invent and popularize “Southern” memories of the Old South and the Civil War. In the process, the magazines nationalized white Southern conceptions of racial separation and prepared the way for the explosive nationwide reaction to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.Cultural Reconstruction shows how twentieth-century American national unity was paradoxically bound up in racial division.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Forgetting the Magazine: The Birth of a National Culture

Part I The Rise of Sentimental Public Culture

1. The Fall of the Millennial Nation: The Failure of the Atlantic Cable and the Coming of the Civil War

2. Printing Urban Society: The Social Imagination and the Rise of the Daily Newspaper

3. The Whole Tendency of the Age Is Magazineward: The Post-Jacksonian Magazine and National Culture

Part II Cultural Reconstruction: The American Magazine

4. Competing for Culture: The Rise of the General Magazine

5. The Evolution of Magazine Culture: Sentimentality, Class, and the Editors of Scribner’s:

6. The Genre of Sentimental Realism: The Thematics, Stylistics, and Form of the Postbellum Magazine

7. Cultural Reconstruction: National Unity and Racial Division in the American Magazine

8. From Local Color to Racial Color: The Century and African American Authors

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican StudiesHunter College, City University of New York

The use of U.S.-oriented racial categories in the 2000 decennial census conducted by the Census Bureau in Puerto Rico provided results that may not accurately reflect social dynamics in Puerto Rico, more generally, and inequality based on race, in particular. This work explores how variations in racial typologies used for the collection of data in Puerto Rico and the methodology used to collect such data produce widely ranging results on racial identification that in turn affect the measurement of the impact of “race” on social outcomes. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the omission of locally based and meaningful racial terminology from census questionnaires leads to results on racial identification that differ markedly from those found in survey data that include such terminology. In addition, differing strategies to record the racial identification of Puerto Ricans on the island (i.e., self-identification versus identification by others), lead to variations that highlight the changing effect of race on socioeconomic status. Who identifies a person’s race affects analyses of how race affects the life chances of individuals in Puerto Rico.